Observability Software Use Cases
The o11y Impact on Your Software Lifecycle
Observability helps teams better understand how code is behaving as users interact with it every day. Whether responding to an incident or debugging slowness, Dev, Test and SRE teams troubleshoot together, sharing insights to discover the unknown unknowns. Teams who practice o11y ship faster, can answer new questions without having to write code, intuitively debug at any stage and understand where tech debt lies. Reduce toil and see how you can improve your day-to-day.
Incident Response. No Big Deal
Got an alert? Needs action right now, or can it wait? Validate first, then troubleshoot by slicing and dicing data in real-time. Follow the trail of breadcrumbs to get the right answer every time. Whether starting with query history or asking new questions, rapidly learn what’s going on and see how users experience your code. On-call teams stay on the same page with no context switching between tools. Infinite data cardinality and full-fidelity log, event, and trace data in one place so you resolve issues fast, learn and improve. Incidents happen. Embrace them, observe and don’t let them burn you out.
Blog: Incident Review Learnings
System Optimization. Be Proactive
Performance sluggish? It wasn’t like that the last time you shipped. Metrics won’t tell you why or even if it matters to users. Understand what’s ‘normal’ and let your SLO charts guide you to know if it’s critical, what needs investigation and when. Feature flags and Markers pinpoint when code changed so you know where to inspect more deeply. No longer rely on intuition because BubbleUp spots anomalies and tells you which dimensions are the cause. Switch to trace views to understand span dependencies and see what’s happening end-to-end. Learn why you’re having latency or request errors. Even track infrastructure usage and spend, plus setup triggers for unexpected cost changes.
Blog: Unexpected Usage CostsPain-Free Releases. Friday Deploys!
Under pressure to ship a new release or a fix and need to reliably know it works exactly as you expect? Observe code at each step to get ahead of issues before they impact all users. By working across all teams, you share the same insights throughout the CI/CD cycle. No longer speculate about what is happening in production. Run queries locally and again in testing to watch as you deploy. Compare old against new and spot the patterns that change. Speed up your release cycle from weeks to minutes, continuously improve, and progressively deploy.
Podcast: Test & Dev Review
Ongoing Development. Clean Code
With increasing complexity, frequent deploys and rapid scale, you must practice the first-principles of debugging. Everyone on the team can’t be an expert across all parts of the system. Knowing where to start digging is the key to reduced toil. Clean code means better instrumentation, plus system telemetry informs everyone when on-call or proactively watching prod. Start small and incrementally build for your future selves. Honeycomb’s Beelines support five languages and get you started in minutes with just a few lines of code. It’s so fast, it almost feels like cheating.
Blog - Dev.to Beelines